Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

> Unlike libertarians, Conservatives believe that those who were the recipients of good fortunate have a moral obligations towards the rest of society, in particular the people who do their best but just have less marketable skills.

(In the United States) I have never heard this as a conservative viewpoint.

> In fact, earnings are strongly linked with intelligence, which indicates that they are linked to productivity, just as economic theory predicts.

I'm confused. What does productivity mean?

Are schoolteachers productive? Are CEOs productive? What metrics does one use to compare the productivity between the two?

Even if you can measure the productivity of each, isn't their productivity necessarily contingent on other things functioning? In other words, wouldn't a coal CEO's productivity decline if all coal miners quit?

What about if the CEO quit, or died suddenly? What would happen to the coal miner's productivity as the board searched for a new CEO? I imagine it would change much less than the other way around.

If you assume that productivity at any given point is finite, and the CEO suddenly dies, where does that productivity go? Does the president suddenly gain all the productivity value the CEO had?

In a microcosm like a coal company, I'd question who really 'gets' the productivity points. (Miners vs CEO vs board vs shareholders). I wouldn't think those making the most money necessarily have the actual highest productivity values. It would seem to be nearly the opposite, but maybe I have this scheme of modeling things all wrong.

> I have never heard this as a conservative viewpoint.

Conservatives believe that charity is only charity if it isn't mandatory. Taxes represent seizure of your assets at gunpoint (no one would pay if the IRS didn't enforce). Forcible asset seizure + spending on purposes which you may or may not agree with is many things, but it is not charity.

In terms of actual charity numbers, self-identified conservatives give a lot more.

http://philanthropy.com/blogs/prospecting/conservative-voter...

Households that describe themselves as conservative tend to give more money to charities than moderate and liberal households, according to a new survey.

In a survey of 3,300 households that donated money to charity in the past 12 months, the company Campbell Rinker, in Valencia, Calif., asked respondents about their political ideology.

Of those surveyed, those who live in conservative households donated an average of $3,255 to charities outside of places of worship during the past year. By comparison, moderate households donated $2,926 and liberal households donated $1,879.

http://blog.beliefnet.com/castingstones/2008/04/conservative...

In his book, Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservativism (Basic Books, 2006), Brooks discovered that approximately equal percentages of liberals and conservatives give to private charitable causes. However, conservatives gave about 30 percent more money per year to private charitable causes, even though his study found liberal families earned an average of 6 percent more per year in income than did conservative families. This greater generosity among conservative families proved to be true in Brooks’ research for every income group, “from poor to middle class to rich.”

To round the subject out, Brooks also found that liberals were more likely to donate their time, and that both liberals and conservatives were more likely to donate money than moderates.

Personally, I would certainly pay taxes, even if they weren't at gunpoint. I find roads, police, etc far too convenient to give up.

I haven't read the book that you quote, but I'd be interested to know how much of the conservative donations were related to religious causes.

(1) Roads and police are a relatively small portion of your taxes. So this statement is a little bit of a bait and switch. Most of it goes towards Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and the DoD.

(2) By aggregating everything into "taxes", individual services do not have accountability. The more locally funded something is, the more accountable it is -- and the more likely it will be discontinued if enough people decide it's not worth the money.

(3) The amount matters. You can assent in the abstract, but 1% vs. 10% vs. 90% vs. 100% taxation are very different. As you increase it, more want to opt out. The guns of the IRS ensure that they can't.

I have been on both sides of the fence. As a conservative religions individual, I gave away a higher percentage of my income to what is considered charity. However, even when I don't include tithe, much of that charity was sent to evangelical initiatives, not things that actually... help people. Today, I give less as a percentage of my income, but the percentage of income that actually helps others is substantially higher.

Let's go further. What is charity, in the first place? A donation to public radio is charity, but is more of a payment for a public good. Focus on the Family? Neither of these would be considered a substitute for an abused woman's shelter or a food bank...

Note: In the time and place I was in, there was open talk among evangelicals that social spending was bad because it led people away from the church helping people, decreasing its influence. Charity to the American Evangelical church, much like Hamas or Hezbollah, look at charity as a strategy to consolidate power.

(In the United States) I have never heard this as a conservative viewpoint.

While I'm not a conservative, this is a quite common old-school-Conservative view. Most of these got pushed out of the mainstream of the Republican party, in favor of neo-conservatives and such, so there's no major outlet with a mostly-Conservative viewpoint in the US today. Probably two good current examples are Jerry Pournelle and John Derbyshire.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Derbyshire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle

I think you are on the right track that the author of the post has not equated productivity to an accepted definition. He seems to fail to take into account capital. The relevance of which probably best makes sense to the layman via looking at marginal rate of substitution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_theory_basics#The_ma...

>> Unlike libertarians, Conservatives believe that those who were the recipients of good fortunate have a moral obligations towards the rest of society, in particular the people who do their best but just have less marketable skills.

>(In the United States) I have never heard this as a conservative viewpoint.

Most of the conservatives I know fall into two groups - social conservatives and fiscal conservatives. The social conservatives - some Jewish but mostly Christian - are very charitable because it's part of their faith. The fiscal conservatives I know are cheap bastards (like me).

> > Unlike libertarians, Conservatives believe that those who were the recipients of good fortunate have a moral obligations towards the rest of society, in particular the people who do their best but just have less marketable skills.

Agreed. That doesn't sound like the US Republican Party that I know. And they are supposedly conservative.

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